From Book to Game World — The Echowright Chronicles
Most indie games start with a design document. EchoQuest started with twelve books.
The Echowright Chronicles is a LitRPG and progression fantasy series I wrote over several years. Twelve books, thousands of pages, one sprawling world with its own magic system, political history, and rules for how reality works. When I started building EchoQuest, I didn’t have to invent a setting from scratch. I already had one — one I’d been living inside for a long time.
I want to tell you about that world, because it’s the reason EchoQuest feels the way it does.
Remy Ward and Another World
The series follows Remy Ward, a regular person from Earth who gets pulled into a world that runs on completely different rules. Not summoned by a wizard. Not chosen by a prophecy. Pulled through a crack in reality that shouldn’t have existed, into a place that was already falling apart.
Remy’s story is about survival, growth, and eventually becoming something no one expected. But the part that matters most for the game isn’t Remy himself. It’s the world he found.
Echoes: Memories, Not Souls
The core of the entire setting is a concept called Echoes. Every living thing leaves behind a psychic imprint — a trace of memory, emotion, experience. Not a soul. Not mana. Think of it as the accumulated weight of a life, pressed into the fabric of reality itself. Every person who has ever lived, every creature that has ever hunted or built or loved, has left Echoes behind.
Some people can sense these imprints. That’s the first stage: Echo Sensitivity. From there, with training and talent, you advance through stages of increasing power — learning to channel Echoes, to shape them, to draw on the accumulated memories of the dead and weave them into something real.
At the very top of this progression sits the Echowright — someone who can not only channel Echoes but fundamentally reshape them. Rewrite the psychic record. Alter how the world remembers itself. It’s the rarest and most dangerous tier of progression, and it requires something you can’t earn through training alone: imperial blood.
The Imperium That Fell
Before the events of the books, the world was governed by the Imperium — a sprawling, steampunk-era civilization powered by Echo technology. Brass and iron cities where trains ran on channeled memory, factories driven by the psychic residue of a thousand generations, Echowrights serving as both engineers and rulers. Advanced, ambitious, and deeply flawed.
It fell because of a conspiracy. The Echowrights — the people who held the whole system together — were systematically assassinated. And the conspirators did something worse: they breached the barrier between worlds. They thought they were reaching for power. What they got was corruption.
The Corruption
What poured through the breach wasn’t an army. It was more like a virus. A creeping, spreading wrongness that infects everything it touches — warping creatures into twisted versions of themselves, seeping into the land, turning forests hostile and rivers toxic. It gets into people’s minds.
The corruption is almost a hive-mind, but not quite. It’s at war with itself — different strains pulling in different directions, competing to consume and spread. That internal conflict is the only reason the world survived. If the corruption had been unified, everything would have been overrun within a generation.
Instead, the world got a slow collapse. Without Echowrights to maintain the infrastructure, Echo-powered systems failed one by one. Within a few generations, the world backslid from industrial to medieval. Great cities shrank into city-states and small kingdoms, each one isolated, each fighting corruption at its borders.
Where EchoQuest Picks Up
EchoQuest is set a few years after the twelfth book. Remy completed his journey. Against all odds, he became Emperor — the first Echowright in generations, rebuilding the Imperium from the ruins. But the corruption is still out there. The kingdoms are still fractured. And one person, even an Emperor, can’t fight a war on every front.
So Remy did something characteristically reckless. He opened a portal near the town of Millhaven — a stable breach connecting his world to Earth. Through it, he invited people from our world to come help. That’s you. That’s the players.
In-world, you’re not playing a “game.” You’re an Earth person who stepped through a portal into a world that genuinely needs help. The interface you see — health bars, quest tracker, inventory — isn’t a game mechanic. It’s the System, an imperial AI built by Echowrights centuries ago to organize military campaigns. Remy reactivated it and pointed it at the newcomers from Earth. It gives you structure, classes, and a fighting chance.
Classes as Echo Archetypes
The six classes in EchoQuest aren’t arbitrary game roles. They’re Echo archetypes — different ways of channeling the accumulated memories that saturate the world. The Sentinel draws on Echoes of protectors and soldiers. The Arcanist channels the memories of scholars and spellcasters. The Shadow taps into imprints left by hunters and assassins. The Warden connects to Echoes of healers and guardians. The Wilds channels the memories of beasts and the natural world. And the Void — the most dangerous archetype — reaches into Echoes closest to the corruption itself, wielding unstable power that others won’t touch.
When you pick a class, you’re not just choosing a playstyle. You’re inheriting a lineage of accumulated memory.
The Kingdoms
The world you’ll explore is built from the ruins of that fallen Imperium. The Hearthlands — pastoral and warm, the first region you’ll see. Thornmark — dense forest where corruption has taken root in the trees themselves. Ashenmoor — volcanic badlands scarred by an ancient Echo catastrophe. Ironveil — remnants of steampunk infrastructure, half-ruined and repurposed. Solara — sun-blasted desert hiding underground cities. Frostmere — the frozen north, where corruption manifests as something cold and patient and very old.
Each region has its own politics, its own relationship with corruption, its own history stretching back to the Imperium. None of them exist just to give you a new tileset.
Why This Matters
I could have built EchoQuest’s world from a wiki page and some bullet points. But building from twelve books of lore gives you something different: consistency. The magic system has rules because I spent years stress-testing them through narrative. The kingdoms have politics because characters lived and died over those politics. The corruption behaves the way it does because I wrote hundreds of scenes exploring what it does to people, landscapes, and civilizations.
When you play EchoQuest, you’re walking through a world that has already been lived in. The NPCs reference history that actually happened. The class abilities follow logic established across twelve novels. The corruption isn’t just a game mechanic — it’s a force with behavior and weaknesses that were figured out over thousands of pages.
That’s what I want players to feel. Not just “here are some quests and some monsters.” A sense that this world has depth. That the lore isn’t decoration — it’s the foundation everything else is built on.
The Echowright Chronicles gave EchoQuest its bones. Now the game gets to put flesh on them. I hope you can feel the difference.
— Bruno